TURBU Tech

Firebird is a great database, but it’s got one really irritating drawback: no native support for the boolean type.  The standard solution to this issue is to create a BOOLEAN domain as a special restricted version of a smallint, and then make your database driver output the correct type.

The first part is easy.  The second, not so much, if you want to use DBExpress.  This really should be handled internally as a special case inside the DBX driver.  Unfortunately neither Embarcadero nor Chau Chee Yang, maker of the alternative dbExpress Firebird driver, has released the source to their drivers, neither driver handles the BOOLEAN domain, and neither driver has any sort of callback/event handler that you can set up to intercept and modify the schema of a query result.  But I’m not gonna let a little thing like that stop me! Continue reading ‘Adding boolean support to Firebird+DBX’ »

The last few versions of MS SQL Server have included a feature where you can create new functions in .NET assemblies and register them with the database server. This can be a good way to deal with concepts that are difficult to express in T/SQL, and it can provide some big performance boosts. The process is not without its warts, though. Continue reading ‘When is a null not a null?’ »